War Refugee Association. Throughout 1946, the association’s leaders wrote eloquent pleas to Rada, hoping for the resumption of payments. In the spring of 1947 the association’s own funds ran out as more and more refugees landed on American shores; in the summer of 1945 alone, about two thousand persons had registered with the New York association.109 The association dissolved, transferring its responsibilities to the newly created Polish Immigration Committee of New York.
In addition to humanitarian action, politics was another area of contact and cooperation between the refugees and Polonia. Franklin Delano Roosevelt won an overwhelming majority of Polish-American votes in 1940.110 Convinced of the benefits of Polonia’s loyalty, the president made friendly gestures toward the representatives of the London-based Polish government in exile.111 But the support for Roosevelt and the Democratic Party that Polonia demonstrated in the first years of the war was tested when, in June 1941, Hitler’s army invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin became an instant ally and the American government rushed in with material assistance for the Soviets. For the Poles who vividly remembered “the stab in the back” from the Soviet army that had invaded and annexed territories of eastern Poland during the 1939 war with Germany, accepting the Soviet Union as an ally of Great Britain and the United States was difficult indeed. In the summer of 1941 Polish prime minister Władysław Sikorski signed an agreement with Soviet ambassador Ivan Maiski, which allowed deported and imprisoned Poles in the Soviet Union to leave the country. Stalin, however, did not give any guarantees of a return to the prewar Polish borders. Sikorski’s moderate position and his restoration of Polish-Soviet relations prompted a serious rift within the Polish government in exile, resulting in staunch opposition to any further dealings with the Soviets. The situation changed again when the United States entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The constraints of neutrality had come to an end, and Polish Americans could fully demonstrate their support for the war effort. The number of Polish Americans in the American military totaled nine hundred thousand.112 Those who did not actively serve contributed to the war economy and purchased government bonds in record numbers.113
The political unity of the first years of the war, however, seemed to be breaking up. On the left side of Polonia’s political spectrum, a relatively small but significant group of pro-Soviet Polish socialists based in Detroit became involved in the creation of the American Slav Congress, established in April 1942 under the leadership of Leo Krzycki, a vice-president of the CIO’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Krzycki was considered to have a following among left-wing Poles, centered in the Polish Labor Party and the nine thousand members of the Polish section of the International Workers Order. The CIO opted for American-Soviet friendship, support for the Red Army, and the opening of a second front. In 1943 another pro-Soviet group, the Kosciuszko League, composed solely of Polish Americans, was formed by a maverick Roman Catholic priest, Stanisław Orlemański. The most eminent spokesperson for the pro-Soviet element, Oskar Lange, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, worked closely with both of the above organizations.114
The right side of the political spectrum was occupied by the National Committee of Americans of Polish Descent (Komitet Narodowy Amerykanów Polskiego Pochodzenia, KNAPP), formed in New York in 1942. The leadership of KNAPP included representatives of the Polish-American press, editors and publishers Maksymilian F. Węgrzynek and Frank Januszewski.115 They were aided by a vocal group of new arrivals from the prewar Polish government’s Piłsudski faction (called Piłsudskiites, or Piłsudczycy, supportive of the prewar regime, or Sanacja), which included such distinctive figures as General Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszewski, ambassador of Poland in Rome and member of governmental circles in interwar Poland, Wacław Jędrzejewicz, Henryk Floyar-Rajchman, and Ignacy Matuszewski. They believed that American Polonia had not only a moral obligation to Poland but also the political means to have an impact on United States foreign policy. Shocked by the presumed lack of involvement and inaction of Rada, they formed a political lobby to promote the anti-Soviet position and to denounce Sikorski and his moderate policies. Although KNAPP’s membership never surpassed two or three thousand, its impact on the increasing politicization of American Polonia at that time and on the creation of the Polish American Congress in 1944 was considerable.116
The Chicago headquarters of the major Polish-American organizations and Francis X. Świetlik, the president of the Polish American Council, represented a more centrist position, which included support for Sikorski and his policies and for Roosevelt as well. The turning point in the wartime relationship between American Polonia and Roosevelt’s Democratic administration came in the spring of 1943. At that time, the Germans announced the discovery of mass graves of some fifteen thousand Poles in the Katyń Forest, near Smolensk. The Germans blamed the Soviets for the mass murder; the Soviets announced that the Germans had committed the crime after entering the Soviet territories in 1941. When the Sikorski government confronted Stalin and demanded a Red Cross–led investigation, the Soviets unilaterally broke diplomatic relations with the Polish government in exile. Shortly thereafter, Sikorski died in an unexplained plane crash over Gibraltar and was replaced as prime minister by Stanisław Mikołajczyk.
Historians have argued that “the impact of the Polish-Soviet split on domestic politics in the United States was considerable. Those moderate elements in the Polish community who had refrained from public and divisive attacks on the Soviet Union in response to unity pleas by the Roosevelt administration now found themselves bitterly agreeing with the KNAPP militants.”117 On the other hand, the pro-Soviet Poles vigorously attacked KNAPP and its supporters on the pages of Detroit’s Głos Ludowy (People’s Voice), the only pro-Soviet Polish daily in the country. The concern of the administration over the KNAPP-inspired anti-Soviet campaign was reflected in its initiation of the circulation of a pamphlet attacking KNAPP signed by more than thirty moderate and leftist Poles.118
Throughout 1943 American Polonia observed with gravity how the American public as well as the government generally accepted the Soviet side of the Katyń story and showed signs of deliberately undermining the demands of the Polish government in exile.119 The U.S. War Department refused to launch any investigation into the Katyń massacre, despite the appeals of nine Polish-American congressmen led by John Lesinski of Michigan, Thaddeus Wasilewski of Wisconsin, and Joseph Mruk of New York. During the Big Three meeting in Tehran in 1943, the fate of Poland’s eastern border was decided without consultation with the Poles. Approached by Polish Americans inquiring about the results of the meeting, Roosevelt, who was determined to keep the agreements secret, offered vague and inconclusive answers.120 Shortly afterward, the White House allowed two controversial figures connected with the American Slav Congress, Professor Oskar Lange and the Reverend Stanisław Orlemański, to travel to Moscow on a direct invitation from Stalin. In response to widespread criticism from major Polish-American newspapers, the White House announced that the two had journeyed as private citizens and had no right to speak for the United States.121
Political issues concerning postwar arrangements in Europe continued to occupy public attention. The Polish-American community expressed vivid interest in assuring the existence of a sovereign and independent Polish state. Charles Rozmarek, the president of the PNA since 1939 and a rising star in Chicago Polonia, together with KNAPP leaders and some other activists from the Polish press and clergy realized that Polonia needed to establish a political presence that could exert greater pressure on Washington. As a result, the Polish American Congress (PAC) was founded in May 1944 at a meeting of some twenty-five hundred representatives of Polonia gathered in Buffalo, New York. The PAC, as a large federation of fraternal, church, and professional organizations, immediately evoked enormous enthusiasm among American Polonia. Soon the PAC claimed 6 million members and followers, and was supported by nearly all Polish-American organizations.122
The PAC accepted the leadership of American Polonia in a difficult moment. Roosevelt, conscious of the significance of the Polish vote in the upcoming presidential elections, agreed to meet with Mikołajczyk in the summer 1944, but demanded that the premier have no contact with Polish Americans. On August 1, 1944 an uprising broke out in Warsaw, led by the
